Digital versus Paper Map Prices

Digital map prices are now either cheaper, much cheaper or very comparable
to paper prices.

It’s hard to make an exact comparison. Your own personal circumstances
for using a map, the area covered/desired, and the promotions available
on paper or digital at the time can swing these numbers. Do you want
HDor SD digital maps? On the paper side, waterproof or standard paper?

Finally there is personal preference. I’m a big fan of Amazon’s Kindle
for reading books, yet for periodicals which I don’t tend to read linearly
I still prefer the paper format.

For my comparison, I am going to consider HD digital maps as these are
in fact the data the OS prints the paper maps from. On the paper side,
I will look at standard paper.

The main conclusions of this article are:

For Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger mapping, for small
areas digital is cheaper than paper, and on large areas it is much cheaper.
For Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 Explorer maps for small areas
digital and paper prices are now fairly well aligned – individual comparisons
can swing it either way. For full country coverage, digital is much cheaper
than paper.

Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger mapping

The royalties for Landranger mapping have been constant for a long period
of time. The one major change that happened quite a few years ago, is that
the OS removed the minimum royalty. This minimum used to mean that selling
1 sq km of map returned the same royalty as selling 1/10th of Great Britain.
Hence we never used to sell small products.

It would appear that getting a 35% discount on the paper map price online
is pretty easy. So let’s use £4.54 as the paper map price.

There are 204 maps in the series, so that would bring a price of £926.16.
I’m sure there is most likely further discount available on that, but it’s
still a long way from GB 50k HD at
£120.

Looking at smaller areas, a Landranger map is 40km*40km, so 1600 sq km.
Our cheapest Cut-Your-Own is
£9 for 8000 sq km. 8000/1600 = 5, so you would get the equivalent of five
maps for £9, which would buy just two of the paper variety.

Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 Explorer Mapping

The story here is quite a lot more complex on the history of royalties.
The Ordnance Survey’s pricing until very November last year was linear
per sq km, but extremely expensive. In November we got a massive price
reduction of over 90% on a full country, but a much smaller reduction for
small areas.

It would appear that it’s quite easy to get a paper Explorer map online
for £5.19.

There are 408 Explorer maps in the series, so that would be a cost of
£2117.52, which is much more expensive than our GB 25k Pro HD package
which costs just £330.

For smaller areas, a standard Explorer map is 20km * 20km, so 400 sq km.
Looking at our Cut-Your-Own,
250 sq km costs £3.60, so looking at this as a price per sq km, its 1.3p
for paper, and 1.44p for digital. So on the very smallest areas, paper
maps work out about 10% cheaper per sq km.

However, it’s easy to swing this last calculation. If you choose an Explorer
map with a lot of water, but only choose land tiles when using Cut-Your-Own,
digital will work out cheaper. The other major difference is if the area
you want spans across two Explorer maps you have to buy both maps in paper,
whilst with digital you can Cut-Your-Own and buy just what you need.